Linus Torvalds Quotes

109 Sourced Quotes

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

Linus Torvalds
Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.

Linus Torvalds
When you say, "I wrote a program that crashed Windows," people just stare at you blankly and say, "Hey, I got those with the system, for free."

Linus Torvalds
Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.

Linus Torvalds
…git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful […] I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Linus Torvalds
Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix.

Linus Torvalds
So the whole "We have a list and we're not telling you" should tell you something. Don't you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they'd just tell us and go, "nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!"?

Linus Torvalds
C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

Linus Torvalds
I chose 1000 originally partly as a way to make sure that people that assumed HZ was 100 would get a swift kick in the pants.

Linus Torvalds
Sometimes "pi = 3.14" is (a) infinitely faster than the "correct" answer and (b) the difference between the "correct" and the "wrong" answer is meaningless. And this is why I get upset when somebody dismisses performance issues based on "correctness". The thing is, some specious value of "correctness" is often irrelevant because it doesn't matter. While performance almost always matters. And I absolutely detest the fact that people so often dismiss performance concerns so readily.

Linus Torvalds
Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well.

Linus Torvalds
No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical.

Linus Torvalds
Somebody is trying to kill all the kernel developers. First we had two earthquakes - fine, this week God not only hates republicans, but apparently us kernel developers too. But we kernel developers laugh in the face of danger, and a 5.5 earthquake just makes us whimper and hide in the closet for a while.
But after we've stopped cowering in the closet, there's a knock on the door, and the conference organizers are handing out skate boards, with the innocent explanations of "We're in San Diego, after all".
If that's not a sign of somebody trying to kill us, I don't know what is. Handing out skate boards to a bunch of geeks sounds like a seriously misguided thing to do.

Linus Torvalds
XML is crap. Really. There are no excuses. XML is nasty to parse for humans, and it's a disaster to parse even for computers. There's just no reason for that horrible crap to exist.

Linus Torvalds
To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you're never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs.

Linus Torvalds
You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now.

Linus Torvalds
Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy. (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I'm flexible, and not black-and-white.)

Linus Torvalds
I don't respect people unless I think they deserve the respect. There are people who think that respect is something that should be given, and I happen to be one of the people who is perfectly happy saying no; respect should be earned. And without being earned, you don't get it. It's really that simple.

Linus Torvalds
Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my butt every day. That's how much that paper is worth.

Linus Torvalds
The main reason there are no raw devices [in Linux] is that I personally think that raw devices are a stupid idea.

Linus Torvalds
I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] … but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.

Linus Torvalds
Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's my choice, dammit.

Linus Torvalds
For example, the GPLv2 in no way limits your use of the software. If you're a mad scientist, you can use GPLv2'd software for your evil plans to take over the world ("Sharks with lasers on their heads!!"), and the GPLv2 just says that you have to give source code back. And that's OK by me. I like sharks with lasers. I just want the mad scientists of the world to pay me back in kind. I made source code available to them, they have to make their changes to it available to me. After that, they can fry me with their shark-mounted lasers all they want.

Linus Torvalds
Get rid of it. And I don't *ever* want to see that shit again.

Linus Torvalds
C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.

Linus Torvalds
There aren't enough swear-words in the English language, so now I'll have to call you perkeleen vittupää just to express my disgust and frustration with this crap.

Linus Torvalds
A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die.

Linus Torvalds
Obsessing about things is important, and things really do matter, but if you can't let go of them, you'll end up crazy.

Linus Torvalds
Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did.

Linus Torvalds
Even if the Hurd didn't depend on Linux code (and as far as I know, it does, but since I think they have their design heads firmly up their asses anyway with that whole microkernel thing, I've never felt it was worth my time even looking at their code), I don't believe a religiously motivated development community can ever generate as good code except by pure chance.

Linus Torvalds